


What Went Wrong with Slash: The Movie

by Franzeska



Category: Fandom - Fandom, Slash (2016)
Genre: Gen, Meta
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-20
Updated: 2017-03-20
Packaged: 2018-10-08 03:42:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,268
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10377129
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Franzeska/pseuds/Franzeska
Summary: Clay Liford'sSlashis a sweet coming of age film that depicts a type of male bisexuality rarely seen in media. Unfortunately, it does so at the expense of erasing women's history.





	

Clay Liford's _Slash_ is a sweet coming of age film that depicts a type of male bisexuality rarely seen in media. Unfortunately, it does so at the expense of erasing women's history. The director was kind enough to meet me for coffee to discuss his film and why on earth he would choose the topic of slash fanfiction yet make it all about the men.

Clay's response horrified me. It's not that he's a bad guy; in fact, if he'd had bad intentions, that would make the whole thing easier to swallow. What was so horrifying as a fanworks fan and fandom historian was that he went in knowing quite a lot about slash fandom, doing a fair amount of research, and thinking he was making a sensitive, positive portrayal--yet he came out with a film that is alienating and dismissive. The very biggest culprits: he started with the story he wanted to tell and went looking for a backdrop rather than finding a story that arose organically from his subject matter, and he didn't know what he didn't know. Here's a quote from an interview he did:

> [I]t’s been years since I was young and in hiding regarding my once-taboo interests. Stuff like “Star Trek” fan clubs (card carrying member here), that would have gotten you a major wedgie for even mentioning in my youth, have now been completely co-opted by the mainstream. Dudebros watch Star Trek now. I needed to dig deeper.
> 
> Fan fiction, and specifically erotic fan fiction, is sort of the last outpost of fringe fandom. Even in my convention days, it was segregated from the crowd by an age-gated, “18-Up” door, promising an adult Shangri La within. Nerds are traditionally stereotyped to be awkward when it comes to all things sexual, and here we have what the outside world I guess would consider the nerd “sex-pit.” I guess you could say erotic fan fiction, especially the primarily homo-erotic slash fiction, is the Alamo of nerdom, and as such was exactly the metaphor I needed to explore the feelings of my youth and my desire to find justification for my weird interests with a peer group I wasn’t fortunate enough to be geographically oriented around in my daily life.

If you're like most fic fans, slashers or otherwise, that quote has so many red flags you won't even know where to start criticizing it.

Clay felt that by being an oldschool science fiction fan, he was One Of Us and had every right to make this film. He furthermore felt that, while the film had more men than was realistic, it wasn't that bad at representation. He felt that his film would help pave the way for others like it. He's wrong on the first two counts. I hope he's right on the last.

What follows is my analysis of what went wrong with the film _Slash_ and how filmmakers can do better. This is of pressing concern to me since I'm about to start crowdfunding a short about slash fans that is inspired by my dissatisfaction with Clay's film.

 

# The Film & Its Characters

 _Slash_ is the story of Neil, a teenage boy who is probably bi in a confused, questioning teenage way. He writes porny male/male fanfiction of an interminable sci-fi doorstop/pulp novel series that has just been turned into a movie. It's the sort of book series you saw a lot of in the 80s and early 90s. Clay has said the specific inspiration is the [Retief books by Keith Laumer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keith_Laumer#Retief).

Neil has a crush on the hot guy who is the lead in the school play. That guy seems friendly (actually, it's played like he reciprocates Neil's feelings) He encourages Neil to show him is writing. Neil is later humiliated by the bitchy leading lady who mocks him telling him: "You know he's straight, right?" At another point, students steal Neil's notebook and read bits of it aloud, calling him a freak. Most of the bullies are female; none have any idea what fic is.

Another classmate, Julia, overhears Neil being bullied and befriends him, introducing him to an online fic archive called The Rabbit Hole, which looks and operates like an early 00's forum. Julia writes self-insert barbarian/elf maiden porn about a high fantasy series (also books? comics?). She hits on Neil's sister and claims that all women are bisexual; it felt like a stereotype of "fake bi girls" to me. Julia drags Neil along to smoke pot and hang out with her bitchy, pregnant best friend and her shitty older boyfriend, both of whom think geek stuff is stupid and weird. The boyfriend says things like "Okay, Elfquest" to Julia, mocking her elf cosplay. (These are contemporary high school students. Hands up how many of you under 40 know what Elfquest even is?)

Neil's father is a loveable doofus who eventually helps his son with geeky things as a way of bonding. Neil's mother is a stereotypical out-of-touch bitchy career woman who might be divorcing his dad. Neil mentions her when apologizing to Julia that his house isn't nicer. Julia's father is dead, and her (offscreen) mother is a stereotypical abusive religious fanatic. Neil's sister is Cool and Fashionable and plays in a band; she thinks geek stuff is stupid.

Through the fic archive, Neil meets one of the admins, Denis, a gay man in his 30s who ships the same thing Neil does. Julia persuades Neil to go to a Comic Con-style convention that has an 18-and-up live fanfic reading: only the best writers, as chosen by the forum mods, will have a chance to read. Neil is chosen; Julia is not. (We later find out that Neil ratted Julia out for not being 18 but kept up his own pretense.)

At the con, they meet the two head mods: the aforementioned Denis and also Ronnie, a queen bitch woman who is the closest thing the film has to a villain. They also meet a couple of the mods' (minor character) friends: one a quiet, socially awkward woman and the other a fun, funny, wisecracking guy.

Neil is interested in Julia. Julia thinks Neil is gay and is wrapped up in her shitty, abusive boyfriend. They ditch each other and have teen drama. Neil tries to hook up with Denis but fails when Denis realizes he is way underage. Ronnie eventually kicks Neil and Julia out for being too young to attend the fanfic reading panel, but not before they've delivered a speech about self-acceptance. Back at school, Julia is still dating the asshole, and Neil has been blocked from the adults-only fic archive, but Neil has also gained new self confidence. Julia's best friend tells him to give Julia time: she'll come around eventually.

(So all of the geek stuff is out of date or from different eras, none of it reads like current slash fandom, and the overall plot is a bog standard shy boy plus manic pixie dream girl scenario. However, it does have an interesting depiction of male bisexuality, and the part where Denis realizes he's about to hook up with a 15-year-old and freaks out is sweetly and sensitively handled.)

Throughout this, we see scenes from Neil's fanfiction and hear characters read other fanfiction aloud. Those parts are all hilarious, spot-on parodies, especially the sex pollen and the ridiculous curtainfic that ends the movie. Kudos to the filmmakers for casting a black guy as Neil's fictional crush object and for making the characters in his fic really, really hot. Random blow job guy is my favorite! (And also the most amusing cast/crew member who was at the screening. You go, dude.) The fic interludes are the only bright spot in an otherwise deeply annoying portrayal of slash fandom.

# The Gender Gap in Media

Aja's article suggested that there were _no_ female slashers in the film. Clay took great offense: It's 50/50, he said, way better than the film and television average! But how do we measure "better" in this context?

We all know that Hollywood is unfair. Men have more speaking roles than women. Men have more lines than women. [One study of screenplays for big movies](https://pudding.cool/2017/03/film-dialogue/index.html) shows that only a tiny handful of films have majority-female dialogue, and even a 50/50 split is rare. [Here's a long academic paper](http://annenberg.usc.edu/sitecore/shell/Controls/Rich%20Text%20Editor/~/media/10575E37F34248C585602A69C18F2CBE.ashx) on how recent Hollywood films are still all about the straight, white men. Many of these studies show that men or male leads or words of dialogue spoken by a male outnumber their female counterparts by 2 to 1. Women get 33% of the limelight while being 51% of the population.

Television does a little better. The Center for the Study of Women in Television & Film found that: "The percentage of female characters with speaking roles was highest on broadcast network programs (41%), followed by streaming programs (38%), and cable programs (33%). So what we're seeing is that prestige TV looks just like big films, and lower status TV has more women.

Those thirty-something percentages are the ones Clay referenced to me. If regular Hollywood is 33% female, and Clay's film is 50%, doesn't that mean he's doing better? Not necessarily!

Slashers are hard to gather statistics on. We know we're majority female, but how much of a majority? Small-scale polls often show about 95% female. Centrumlumina's broader study of AO3 users showed only 85% female. _However_ , it showed a mere 3% male. Those statistics aren't for slashers specifically, but AO3 is a particularly slash-heavy location for fanworks, and anecdotal evidence supports the idea that slash fandom is even more overwhelmingly female and non-male than other parts of fanworks fandom. (Put another way, there are more straight men elsewhere in fandom than gay men writing slash. Just because there are more dudes in the fic doesn't mean that there are more dudes writing it.) So, roughly speaking, it would be fair to compare Clay's 50/50 split to the reality of 85% female or 97% non-male and then compare that to the TV and movie stats.

  * 51% women in the population down to 33% of speaking roles is a drop of 35%.
  * 85% of slashers down to 50% of roles in this film is a drop of 41%.
  * 97% down to 50% is a drop of 48%.



If you take into account the community Clay was depicting, his film is actually much _worse_ than the horrendous Hollywood default!

Aja was right: while the exact ratio of speaking roles may be 50/50, that doesn't mean it _feels_ equal to a viewer. The reasons for this are three things: First, a slash fan will know slash fandom much better than the filmmaker and feel the gender problem more keenly. Second, the specific character types that Clay chose made the men more prominent than the women even when both were present in a scene. Third, the film accidentally hits on some things that I am sensitized to as a fan, like implying that the filmmakers don't understand the difference between "slash" and "erotic fanfiction".

I found that Clay was very quick to defend his film on purely quantitative terms like number of men with speaking roles but slow to understand why those stats didn't translate into the audience reaction he was expecting. I will try to enumerate the problems I had with the film, using both hard numbers and subjective cultural knowledge.

# Women are Bitches; Men are Friends -- Or "Don't Do Your Slash Research on Reddit!"

What's the first thing you think of when you think of slash fandom as a community, beyond the fic itself? _Women's friendship._

One of Clay's excuses is that it makes sense to have Neil as the protagonist because he's an outsider in a community of outsiders: even though he is finding His People in the film, because he's a man, he'll always stick out a little. He said he'd read a number of accounts on Reddit by gay men saying that slash feels fetishistic to them, and they're uncomfortable with it.

This outsider-among-outsiders idea is interesting and would be a good inspiration for a film about a lone gay man entering slash fandom amidst a sea of women. For example, I think it would be very interesting to see a film about Jamie Fessenden's experiences. (He's that gay male author of m/m romance who wrote [that popular blog post](https://jamiefessenden.com/2014/06/28/my-take-on-women-writing-mm-romance/) about why that pro genre is mostly written by women.) But who goes to _Reddit_ of all places to research a subculture that is known to be heavily female? _Of course_ you're going to find gay guys saying they don't like slash fandom: On Reddit you will always find every kind of guy disapproving of women for so much as breathing, never mind creating a subculture and all the infrastructure to support it. There are plenty of nuanced stories to tell about how slash fandom is not always welcoming to gay men, but they would need to start from something like Fessenden's blog post, not from blanket disapproval of women existing or from a desire to erase and steal women's history.

Like other fans pointed out at the time, if one really wanted to tell an outsider-among-outsiders story, why not just make a slash fandom film about a woman of color?

Or what about a AFAB non-binary person who is just discovering their identity and trying to figure out how much is really them and how much is an internalized misogyny "Not like the other girls" attempt to distance themselves from other slash fans? Or a trans man who finds female-majority social spaces more comfortable than gay male spaces? There are lots of types of people who are common in fandom while still being a minority. Any of them would be a good way to explore the sense of finding your tribe but still feeling like an outsider sometimes. Why didn't this film choose a lead like this?

Simple: Clay was making a film about his Gary Stu and looking for a geek backdrop to support that. If this were really about outsider-ness, there would be far more women in the film and far fewer men, and the women who do appear would be more important.

And on the subject of being "important"...

Clay asked me if it was obvious Ronnie was in charge. I laughed. I had caught the dialogue that told me she was editing fic before allowing it into the archive. That kind of "quality" control is very early 00's when it comes to fic archives, though it does tell me she's formally and officially in charge. But who cares? BNFs in fandom, even in the early 00s, usually got that way by being the most admired writers or the friendliest social networkers. Nobody liked the gatekeepers who yelled about bad spelling unless they were already popular for something else. Archive owners don't automatically have high social status just by the _fact_ of them having an archive. It's all of the outreach they do to promote their archive that forges those bonds, or the social status is pre-existing and is the reason they were able to get people together to build an archive in the first place.

Ronnie is funny, but she's a total asshole. Her particular fandom thing is underage Brady Bunch porn, yet she sneers at Vanguard fandom for being "immature". There is no way this woman is a BNF. Even the so-called "inner circle" having dinner with her at the con don't seem to like her much.

The other female fic writer is barely a presence except during the fic reading. We don't really see her friendship with Ronnie. Julia does not make friends at the con and appears to have no pre-existing geeky friendships. Julia's bff is kind of mean to her and most definitely not into geek stuff. Both Julia and Neil have poor relationships with their mothers.

Meanwhile, Neil attends the con and makes a real friend in Denis--something he needed a lot more than a hookup. There is a scene where Neil is waiting in line for the bathroom and overhears Denis and his other friend having a conversation about slash. It's not even a slash con. Three apparently cis men who all like slash in the same Comic Con bathroom line at the same time? REALLY?!

Denis and the wisecracking guy interact elsewhere too, showing that they are friends. Neil has a cute relationship with his father. Repeatedly, the men in the movie make social connections, especially with each other. The women do not. So even though the leads are a boy and a girl, the mods are a man and a woman, and the mods' friends are another male-female pair, the overall impression is of a male social space where women are incidental.

# Does She Even Go Here?

There's another problem: Because the funny, wisecracking character is a man and the quiet, socially weird character is a woman, you remember the man more. He also has way more closeups because he has lines that need to be covered. The woman has few lines, so we don't cut to her. (Editing fail! Reactions are just as important as lines!)

In the pivotal dinner scene where Neil shares the table with Denis, Ronnie, and these two others, the quiet woman is seen only once in a medium closeup. The other time we see her, it's from behind in a group shot. You might not remember she was in the scene at all! She does read an excerpt of an interminable Dumbledore/Gandalf fic later, but it would be easy to forget her in the tally of slash-liking characters in the movie.

Ronnie talks a bunch about RPF and likes Brady Bunch slash. She has a funny conversation with Denis about slashing different versions of Batman. We remember that she's a slasher. Denis likes Neil's fic--it's a fairly important plot point--and Denis is gay, so the audience is going to remember that he's a slasher. The wisecracking friend has funny lines about the fic he likes, so, again memorable.

Neil is the protagonist, and we hear about and see his fic a lot. His fic taste makes the biggest impression. It's mostly m/m, though there's a space orgy part.

And then there's Julia. She's the second most important character and, supposedly, a slasher. But the only fic of hers that we hear anybody read is a porny het fic. She also comments about Neil's fic that she's glad he has actually included a woman for once. Yes, she's encouraging Neil, and yes she's certainly a fic writer, but is she actually a slash fan at all? She sounds more like somebody who is annoyed at how much slash there is in fandom. While Clay and the other people who made the movie have explained slash correctly during interviews, the movie itself makes me wonder if they think that "slash" just refers to all explicitly pornographic fic instead of all male/male fic (or all m/m plus all f/f). This is an irritatingly common misconception, even inside of fandom.

# What Went Wrong?

Put simply, I think Clay made the very _male_ error of looking at our products and our output--fic--and thinking that was the core of our communities. Objects are not community. Social ties are.

Further, he made the typical male geek error of thinking that every flavor of male geek who has ever had a hard time socially is part of the same "us" that is slash fandom. Yes, back when everyone knew what Elfquest was, Media Fandom and SF fandom were still close cousins. Now, slash fandom and fanworks fandom have almost nothing to do with the kind of fandom that is at World Con. Comic Cons and actor events might be geeky, but they're just another thing that lots of fic fans may also enjoy: there's no natural unity of those communities. It's like saying that fans of this American football team and fans of that Italian soccer team are the same thing because they're both sports fans.

Fandoms for TV shows (other than The Brady Bunch) are almost unmentioned in the film, yet it was Star Trek that caused the split between "SF fandom" and "Media Fandom". Since then, fanfiction-writing fandom has been defined by its love of TV series. If you ask me, the moment slash fandom truly became its own thing was when Starsky & Hutch went on the air. While fic fandom _tends_ to be more into sff, buddy cop shows were the foundation of slash along with Star Trek. The geek part is how we respond to media, not necessarily the genre of that canon.

Later, huge parts of fic fandom came in through anime in ways that had little to do with ye olde SF fandom, and in recent years, book fandoms have become big. It's not just Harry Potter anymore: it's tons and tons of book series. But what genre are those? While most of them are some type of speculative fiction, they're also often YA and often urban fantasy or near future dystopias. They couldn't be more different from the space opera and high fantasy that Clay is obviously drawing from. Whether it's Doctor Who or MCU, we're into a lot of things that happen, more or less, in the contemporary real world. When I see those older sff genres overlap heavily with fic fandom now, it's in Dragon Age and Mass Effect, not lengthy novel series from the 80s.

There's nothing wrong with making a film about the genres you care about, even when they're retro. (Hell, I'm about to do it with slashers and buddy cops.) But there are so many of them chosen so poorly that the film feels even more alienating and odd than just the gender breakdown would have if other details were correct. If it were _just_ about "Vanguard" (Neil's fandom), it would feel deliberate instead of like bad research.

The focus on mainstream cons is weird considering what die-hard fic people some of these characters are supposed to be. They'd be at a tumblr meetup or a slash con. The focus on essentially winning a contest to be allowed to read in front of a room of people is bizarre. It's more hierarchical dude bullshit that is alien to most parts of fic fandom. Yeah, we used to do fic awards, but they were wanky garbage, they're old fashioned now, and they didn't usually involve an embarrassing live reading of this type. Most of the live readings of slash I've been to have been drunk room parties, and the fics were… uh… not chosen for their quality, shall we say.

The film also has standard indie movie problems: The crowd at the fic reading was drawn from whomever they could get at the con where they were filming. There are a number of women in the crowd, but nothing like the ratio there should be. Getting extras is difficult, but this is why the call should have been for female extras only. Someone who was a part of the community would have been bothered enough by that detail for it to be a dealbreaker.

Many of the actors are friends of the director. They're real actors, so that's not the problem, but it just so happens that he has two comedian friends who have standard characters they do in their acts: wisecracking guy and socially awkward girl. Honestly, they're both hilarious and would be great in these roles in _some_ context, but blindly casting them together here has the problems I outlined above. Replacing the guy with a female comedian with a similarly big personality would have solved the problem, but indie movies lack resources, and directors like to have all of their usual crew on their projects.

The title is more of the same: Clay says he wasn't claiming to speak for fandom, yet he chose a film title that is so stunningly presumptuous, and now that he has used it, nobody else can. When I asked about it, he said he had reservations, but they didn't have anything pithier, so he was bullied into using it by his producers.

I don't think he's just making excuses: everything we talked about was very familiar to me as a filmmaker. You make a lot of compromises to get a film out the door. Unfortunately, this film makes the wrong ones.

# So What?

"It's just an indie film. How many people really saw it? Why do you care so much?"

I care because it got good reviews at film festivals. I care because geek culture reporters reported on it as a film for fic fandom. I care because geeky actors gave it shoutouts on twitter. I care because it grossly misrepresents a female and non-male community as being by and for men, and _none of these people noticed_.

I care because it has become impossible to hide: we can either make our own media and represent ourselves, or we can wait for outsiders to come try to make a buck off of us. If we had accurate representation, half of the problems with this film would never have happened, and nobody would have let it off the hook. If we had more representation--good, bad, and indifferent--it wouldn't matter that this one film got some things wrong.

As it is, somewhere, there's a little female baby geek feeling validated for the first time by this film… while subconsciously being trained that she is inferior to men.

**Fuck that!**


End file.
